Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories

PENGUIN CLASSICS

BILLY BUDD, BARTLEBY, AND OTHER STORIES

HERMAN MELVILLE was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Melville tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as an ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. His books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick. But literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866 to 1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, on September 28, 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, “Billy Budd, Sailor,” was left unfinished and uncollated; packed tidily away by his widow, it was not rediscovered and published until 1924.

PETER COVIELLO is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature and, most recently, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, which was a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies.

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Billy Budd and Other Stories published in Penguin Books 1986

Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories with the story “The Lightning-Rod Man” and an introduction and notes by Peter Coviello published 2016

Introduction and notes copyright © 2016 by Peter Coviello

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is the reading text as edited from a genetic study of the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Chicago Press. © 1962, University of Chicago.

The Piazza Tales and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” are the MLA approved texts from the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville’s writings, reprinted by kind permission of Northwestern University Press. © 1987 by Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library.

eBook ISBN 9780698191327

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. | Coviello, Peter, editor.

Title: Billy Budd, Bartleby, and other stories / Herman Melville ; introduction and notes by Peter Coviello.

Other titles: Short stories

Description: New York: Penguin Books, 2016. | Series: Penguin Classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2015034976 | ISBN 9780143107606 (paperback)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Classics. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).

Classification: LCC PS2382 .C66 2016 | DDC 811/.3—dc23

Cover illustration: Duke Riley

Version_1

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by PETER COVIELLO

Suggestions for Further Reading

A Note on the Text

BILLY BUDD, BARTLEBY, AND OTHER STORIES

The Piazza Tales

The Piazza

Bartleby, the Scrivener

Benito Cereno

The Lightning-Rod Man

The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles

The Bell-Tower

The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids

Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)

Notes

Introduction

New readers are advised that this introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.

Amasa Delano is uneasy. The American ship captain, who takes center stage in “Benito Cereno,” Herman Melville’s hypnotic tale of 1855, strides the deck of a distressed slave ship and wonders what he is about. He has come aboard to provide aid to the Spanish vessel San Dominick, which has been ravaged by illness and violent turns of weather. But as the day unfolds he feels more and more that something on the strange ship is, if not quite alarming, indefinably amiss. Disquieted by the stilted, pantomimic manners of the San Dominick’s captain, Benito Cereno, as well as by unexplained breaches of shipboard decorum, unruly slaves, and misbehaving sailors—“All this is very queer now, thought Captain Delano”—the American tries to keep his composure and to recall to himself the better angels of his nature. Here he is gazing upon his own boat as it nears. “The less distant sight of that well-known boat,” Melville writes,

Rover by name, which, though now in strange seas, had often pressed the beach of Captain Delano’s home, and, brought to its threshold for repairs, had familiarly lain there, as a Newfoundland dog; the sight of that household boat evoked a thousand trustful associations, which, contrasted with previous suspicions, filled him not only with lightsome confidence, but somehow with half humorous self-reproaches at his former lack of it.

Reader: keep an eye on that dog. Reference to its kind will recur in the narrative, perhaps prickling the attentive reader with the same subarticulate “qualmish sort of emotion” that visits Delano on occasion. It is characteristic of Melville, and especially of the compressed power of Melville’s shorter fiction, that nothing marks this passage as particularly noteworthy or revealing, though we do come to know a bit more about how Captain Delano regards himself. (“‘What, I, Amasa Delano,’” Delano thinks, “‘I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard?—Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean.’”) And, with the exception of that Newfoundland dog, even less marks these as sentences that tremble and strain, that struggle to contain an anger so corrosive and distilled that it threatens to devour everything near it.

But they are, these sentences, and they do. They are a part of one of the most poised, implacable, raging pieces of literature in the whole of the American canon.